Emancipated (35 page)

And all that had begun and ended on that day.

John-Michael had barely spoken a word in the last fifty minutes. It was the longest stretch they'd gone without conversation. Initially, she'd thought he was just enjoying the music. But when she'd asked him the name of the track that had been playing at the time, it was obvious that he wasn't tuned in to the music. His eyes were on the road; his mind was somewhere else entirely.

She watched him awhile. As she did, Grace became aware of John-Michael's male physicality. His forearms weren't as developed as Paolo's, but they were covered with fine light hair, and the muscles beneath were strong, lithe. She'd always thought of John-Michael as skinny, but firm thighs filled his pale blue jeans. In fact, she realized, it was only his torso and hips that were slender. In the shoulders and arms were hints of a powerful, if underexercised body.

Weirdly, she'd never really looked at him that way before. His face was angular and sallow, but without the usual touch of eyeliner and with a few days of dark stubble on his face and throat, his look was much tougher than she was used to. Normally, John-Michael had such a calm, gentle expression.

Today, something deep was troubling him. He looked older. For a moment she thought she was catching a glimpse of how he'd look as a middle-aged man: saturnine and wary.

Yet surprisingly attractive.

She looked away, a little disturbed by the sudden stirrings he was causing within her. Falling for a gay friend? She imagined Candace's response.

Yeah, go there. Way to make Paolo look like a realistic prospect
.

What was wrong with Grace?

Kind of obvious, sis, you need to get laid
.

Maybe that was it? Or was it because now Grace knew that John-Michael wasn't just the sweet, amiable housemate she believed him to be? He had a darker edge. Was it possible she was only attracted to boys with a dark side?

But she had to admit still another explanation. It ran like a current through her. Maybe it was because of the new, secret bond between her and John-Michael.

Grace felt dizzy when she really thought about how much he'd trusted her. The power it gave her over him. She wondered if he had any idea how fiercely protective she felt toward him now.

Her eyes strayed back to the road, carefully avoiding any part of John-Michael. On the stretch of road ahead, the green tent of a roadside booth billowed in the offshore breeze. She could just make out the writing on the sign:
CARAMEL APPLES—FRESH
.

“Omigod, caramel apples,” Grace said. “We gotta get some. Pull over.”

John-Michael eyed her, slow and curious. Silently, he did as she'd asked. The Benz rolled to a soft halt, crunching in the fine gravel of the hard shoulder. They were right at the edge of the coastal road. Seven feet to the right, a scrub-covered rocky hillside rolled steeply down. At the bottom, rocks crumbled into the ocean. Waves crashed against a thin strip of pale golden beach.

John-Michael didn't make any move to get out of the car. He took a cigarette from the pocket of his checked shirt, lit it with a flick of his Zippo lighter.

Grace undid her seat belt, opened the passenger door. She stretched her legs for a second before getting out.

“You want one?”

“I'll take one to go.”

“I'll call Maya to see if the others want some. We'll be home in two hours. They'd still be pretty fresh.”

Plucking her cell phone from her back pocket, Grace strolled over to the stall, which was about fifty feet away. A single car was parked between the Benz and the caramel apple stall. Inside, a family of three was watching a Disney movie on the DVD screens, each eating a big, juicy apple coated in soft caramel. She could smell the buttery warm candy as she passed. Close to the stall it was almost overpowering. Under a clear plastic box, rows of identically sized, glossy caramel apples stood on their heads, wooden sticks in the air. Behind the counter, the vendor grinned.

“I'll take one,” she told him. The call connected. Maya picked up. “Hey, Maya,” Grace began. “What do you say to some caramel apples?” She tucked the phone between her chin and shoulder as the vendor handed her one apple.

“I say ‘hey there, little fella,'” she heard Maya say warmly. “I say, ‘Now, you are one fine-lookin' piece of fruit.'”

Grace smiled. “That's what I thought.” With the phone still under her chin, she nodded at the vendor. “And five more to go.” The vendor wrapped the take-out apples smartly in clear, red-tinted cellophane and put them in a candy-striped paper bag. Grace got her wallet, began to count out some dollars.

Without warning, the vendor's expression shifted, frozen in stark fear. She spun around, following his stare.

John-Michael's Mercedes-Benz convertible was rolling over the crest of the hill. A second later, it pitched toward the steep section. The car picked up speed.

The vendor managed to gasp, “Is that your car . . . ?”

And then there was nothing but the shattering sound of a car crunching into the rocky beach below. Three seconds later, an explosion. A fireball engulfed the entire Benz. The roar and boom passed through her body, a shock wave of raw energy.

For a second, Grace was paralyzed. On autopilot, she slid her phone from between her chin and shoulder and back into her jeans pocket.

She could tell the vendor was trying to say something else to her. But she didn't hear it. She didn't notice her caramel apple flying through the air, flung aside as she turned, racing toward the spot from where John-Michael's car had plunged toward the ocean. Her voice was caught up in her throat, tight and stifled. She could feel her breath coming in gulps. Panic engulfed her.

Then she saw him. Climbing slowly over the rise of the hill, framed with the ultramarine blue of the sea. John-Michael.

As he came closer, she thought she could almost detect a lightness to his step. When he reached her, to her amazement, he smiled.

“Hello, Grace.” He leaned in, planted a soft kiss on her cheek. “Thank you for being here.”

She was too stunned to move. In the distance behind John-Michael, she watched the car with the family of three pull sharply into the road and speed away. Over in his stall, the caramel apple vendor simply stared in horror.

“What . . . did you do?”

John-Michael looked straight into her eyes. “The only thing I could.”

“You . . . were you trying to kill yourself?”

“I jumped out, Gracie. It's a convertible.”

“Why?”

“Why did I jump out?” He glanced over his shoulder to the blazing heap of crushed metal below. “I'd have thought that was kind of obvious.”

“
Why
did you total your
beautiful
car?”

Slowly, he shook his head. “Not my car. Chuck's car. Chuck's car where he shagged Judy. Chuck's car that he loved more than he ever loved me. I thought it could be mine but how, Grace, how could it? Think about what I did to make it mine.”

On the last sentence, his voice broke. A hand went up to his eyes. “You think I can ever forget what I did to get it?”

She put both arms around him, pulled him against her shoulder. Behind his back, she watched thick black smoke twist into the air. The breeze changed for a second and she caught a scent of gasoline and burning rubber.

John-Michael pushed back, wiped his eyes. He turned to face the ocean.

“Good-bye, Dad,” he breathed softly.

She sighed deeply; relief mixed with resignation. “I hope you have a plan for how you're going to explain this.”

“I'll think of something.”

“How about a plan for getting us back to LA?”

He took out his cell phone. “Let's call the house, ask someone to come get us.”

“Candace won't. She's gonna think you've lost your mind.”

“Paolo, then. He's a good guy.”

“Yeah, Paolo. Good ol' reliable Paolo and his Chevy Malibu.”

John-Michael slid an arm around her waist. He drew her gently against him. She responded by putting her own arm around him. They began to walk. In front of them, a narrow ribbon of smoke rose from the side of the road. It began to thread through the air toward them, smoldering tar and burned aluminum on the wind. Until they walked right through.

For a second, Grace felt John-Michael's grip tighten. But he didn't look back.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

BALCONY, MEMORIAL DAY, AFTERNOON

Candace looked up wearily from her homework. “Hey, is someone gonna get the phone?”

It was lunchtime on the Monday after the benefit at Hearst Academy. Everyone was relaxing at the house except John-Michael and Grace, who'd taken off to San Francisco in John-Michael's Benz.

Utterly distracted by what she'd just heard on her cell, Maya ignored Candace as well as the house phone.

Candace was stretched on the gray sofa, flipping through the pages of
Variety
with one eye on the TV, totally uninterested in picking up the call. Dozing on the futon sofa, Paolo stirred. He looked around hopefully for Maya. Before he could object, Maya withdrew hurriedly. She stepped outside the front door and climbed the stairs to the balcony. Then she took out her own cell phone and listened.

Maya's cell was still connected to Grace's phone. She could hear, very clearly, John-Michael's end of the conversation with Paolo, who had just picked up the call on the house phone. John-Michael was laughing about driving his car off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway, but Paolo didn't seem to find it funny. Not at all. From what Maya could tell from John-Michael's end of the conversation, Paolo was appalled.

It wasn't in the same category of shock as Maya's own reaction when she'd first heard Grace gasping aloud, the explosion, and then the terrified yelling—presumably Grace and whoever else saw it happen. It had seemed like an age before she'd heard Grace's voice again. Maya had waited, scarcely daring to breathe as all hell broke loose on the other end of the call.

For at least two minutes, Maya had assumed that John-Michael was dead.

Grace hadn't heard Maya's desperate pleading into the phone. She'd forgotten that the call was still in progress. She must have pocketed the phone, still connected to Maya's.

And now Maya could do nothing but listen in silence to Grace and John-Michael, presumably until the battery of Grace's cell phone ran out.

Eventually, Grace spoke again. “Is he coming to get us?”

John-Michael gave an audible chuckle. “Yeah. He was all, like, ‘Man, have you gone nuts?'”

“What'd I tell you?”

“He'd understand. They all would. If they knew what happened with my dad.”

Maya was seized with curiosity. There was an actual reason for John-Michael trashing that beautiful Mercedes-Benz? She moved from the edge of the balcony where she'd been staring into the flat line of the ocean, and settled into one of the rattan easy chairs.

This conversation sounded way too good to miss. And since it hadn't even happened in the house, technically, Maya felt under zero obligation to report it to Dana Alexander. She was already fencing off as much as she dared. So long as the woman got some kind of information about the housemates, and some of it at least was verifiable, their agreement was valid—in Maya's eyes.

Anyway—how exactly was Dana Alexander going to know what might be going on in the house, apart from what Maya was telling her? Unless one of the other housemates was also a spy . . . ?

It was a chilling idea. For a few seconds it broke right across Maya's thoughts. After a moment or two she dismissed it as crazy paranoia. Surely Alexander wouldn't go that far? Whatever problem the woman had with Lucy and Grace, it couldn't be so serious that she needed a backup spy.

When Maya finally tuned back into the phone conversation, it seemed that John-Michael and Grace had moved on from talking about John-Michael's car.

“Oh,” Grace was saying, “I know why Lucy didn't want us to know about
Jelly and Pie
. And it wasn't just because the show blew chunks.”

John-Michael replied, “Really? Huh, I kinda liked it, but then I have a high tolerance for cheesy TV. I thought the aunt character was pretty cool. And Lucy was way cute.”

“You actually watched it?”

“I wasn't a fanboy, if that's what you mean. But yeah, I used to leave the channel if it was on. And when I met Lucy at rock camp and realized that she was Charlie, yeah, I admit it, I was kind of psyched.”

“Uh-huh.” Then Grace became strangely silent.

“So,” John-Michael said, “you think it was because of the rehab?”

“Do I think
what
was because of the rehab?”

“Lucy. The reason she doesn't talk about being on TV. After the show. She was in rehab. Maybe you didn't know?”

Maya became alert, waiting to hear Grace confirm. But she sidestepped his question with a totally left-field question of her own: “How much do you remember about the Tyson Drew case?”

John-Michael didn't reply. When Grace began to talk again, Maya guessed that he must have simply shaken his head, because he didn't seem to know anything at all. Grace began to explain what sounded like the whole story. Tyson Drew, a party in Hollywood, a murder. Reports in the news about some child TV stars being in the house—maybe they'd witnessed something? Lucy—Lucasta, as she was known in those days; the phone was cutting in and out but Maya managed to pick out the most important details: Charlie from
Jelly and Pie
had been one of the children in the house. Some kind of confusion over the witness reports. A man being found guilty of drowning Tyson Drew. Somebody named Alec Vespa maybe? . . . Alex Vesper!

The name practically stopped Maya's heart.